6 Top Tips for Short Sharp SEO
If the science of search engine optimisation is too much for you to get your head around and the budget won’t stretch to some expert advice, here’s six top tips to help you on the right tracks. Be passionate If you are not excited about the topic you are writing about, you will struggle to convince your audience to get excited too. If you are passionate about a topic it will come out clearly in your writing and if it’s a passion you will find it easier to write too. Being passionate also means you will more likely know and use the buzzwords that people interested in your topic will be searching for, that makes for great SEO. Be Expert Niche topics naturally won’t find mass general traffic but if you can offer information, thoughts, opinions that can’t be found elsewhere then you are far more likely to develop good traffic for your ‘expertise’. Unique content like that helps you rise higher up the competitive search engine rankings too, so the more likely you will get additional hits too. That’s sharp SEO. Use descriptive titles The way you head your pages, is a signpost to visitors but also to search engine bots crawling your site. Using words that clearly describe the content on those pages makes it easier for people to find your pages. Weight is given to these titles too, so if you can sum everything up in a short title you increase your chances of getting a better listing. Use conversational language If you want searches to find your pages, fill those pages with the language they will be searching for. Buzzwords and technical jargon will be great for a few but to reach a wider audience you need to be using those words the majority of people are using. Link beyond You know those bits at the end of TV programmes where they drive you back to their website…..”to find out more go to our website….” They do that because it works. It aids engagement with your original piece and topic and drives people to look for more. So if you have a blog, link beyond for more information on your main site. Externally linking can work to an extent too. Although driving traffic to other sites may not be ideal, may those links open in another window and you won’t necessarily have lost your customer. If the link works and informs them then they will be more likely to return to you as the site that first signposted those facts. Links to other sites can help your SEO too, so linking to sites you perhaps have a favourable relationship with can make great sense. Keep it short and sharp It’s not rocket science so don’t overdo the words. Use understandable vocabulary that explains things sweet and simply. Short, sharp SEO
Using books as an SEO tool
Search engine optimisation is all about online, the latest buzzwords, etc., right? Wrong. Natural search is very dependant upon natural use of language. Understanding how people use language will help you understand how they will search, which in turn should help you pinpoint the words and phrases most likely to get you some decent natural traffic. So, in fact looking at books can help you identify what words are most used in the English (or your chosen language) and unsurprisingly the boffins at Google have developed a tool that can do all the leg-work for you. Ngram Viewer is somewhat hidden within the Google Books back-end but is as relevant to SEO professionals as it is literary experts. Using the extensive database in the Google Books system it has identified how words have been used in books over time. You can see how words have become popular over periods of time and how their use and popularity has also declined. Just choose the words you want to examine and compare, choose the years or period you want to cover, the language and then the smoothing of your curves on the graph. Click search lots of books and await a perfectly formed line graph. The results are very interesting. For example here’s a look at the use of communication words in books published between 1984 and 2008. The domination of the word ‘letter’ could be a bit skewed with the other potential definition of the word but it is interesting to see it’s rise in usage of letter as the use of fax declines. So how can this help SEO? Well looking at what words are most popular is at the core of any SEO professionals work. If you can combine that with knowledge of historic use and also knowledge of how all words wax and wane in popularity over time, you can become better in your role. If you want to be really clever about it too, you can find what words are the most popular in general and keep those always in mind when looking for case studies, examples and newsworthy stories. Unlike other aspects of our daily lives the science of language is still a relatively un-tapped market, but as more and more clients search for metrics that work and you search for the smallest of tweaks for the biggest of marketing gains, expect more time and investment to be made into how we use words and how that can equate to increased revenue. What other language tools do you use to help your SEO?
Google aims for the bullseye with Dart
This morning the Official Google Code blog revealed the giant’s latest step towards world domination – a new web programming language called Dart. In his blog post Lars Bak, Software Engineer, Dart Team, reveals just an early preview of Dart which he says aims to: Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming. Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn. Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution. It’s a class-based programming language and Google has made the language and preliminary tools available as open source on dartlang.org where you can also find several code samples too. While Google is saying this is an early preview it is also saying it wants to rapidly progress the language to be at the heart of development, so it appears with the dwindling Google Labs projects it is throwing it out to the wider developer community to help move it further forward. We haven’t yet had time to play with it and at first glance are not sure what ground-breaking differences it will bring to the developer’s table. What you can bet though is that if the initial interest is strong, Google will invest heavily in it as controlling the very code developers use could further enhance the way Google control the way the web develops. Have you seen Dart? What are your thoughts? Is there a need when Javascript is already so widely used and understood?
English Language Day
You may have seen stories last week about National Poetry Day but were you aware this was just one event in a week long celebration of the English language? As part of the same celebration, today is English Language Day. What? English Language Day is part of the English Project and is apparently “an opportunity for you to share your community’s English”. So it is a celebration of accents, regional lingo and how what you say and how you say it defines who you are. It is a time to show pride in your dropped h and the like. Why? Way back on the 13 October 1362 the then Chancellor of England opened Parliament with the first speech in English. In that same Parliament, a Statute of Pleading was approved that permitted members to use the English language in debate and in the courts. Until then French had been dominant due to the ancestry of the noblemen of the time. The new Act complained that because the French language was relatively unknown in England outside of the nobility, the majority of people had no knowledge of what is being said for them or against them in the courts, which used Law French. From then on it became law that everything “be pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English Tongue”. Thereafter English became the dominant language and as a result 13 October symbolises the survival of English and its development as a world language. So how can you get involved? The English Project and Ordnance Survey have linked up to compile an Alternative Gazeteer of Britain, The Great British Collection of Nicknames for Places or what they are calling Location Lingo. From today they inviting details of nicknames and petnames for places and landmarks even road-junctions or roundabouts or roads. They can be well-known, popular nicknames or private petnames used amongst a few friends. Old or new. There is an element of fun in it but also something serious as they hope that the compiled listings could help Emergency Services who are often puzzled when people phone in with reports of incidents using a nickname to describe the location. The Rules To be classified as Location Lingo by the English Project and Ordnance Survey a nickname or pet name for a place in Great Britain must: 1. must not be an official name or does not appear as a name on the maps in the map viewer 2. have been in regular and recognisable use amongst a group of three or more people for at least a month 3. have not been devised for this project. As well as the nickname or pet name they are also interested in the story behind the name. Why did a place acquire that nickname? If you know, then let them know. We can’t wait to see the final results as we have a feeling there could be a rush to register domain names for the list of nicknames.